Misanthropy

Misanthropy is the general hatred, distrust or contempt of the human species or human nature. A misanthrope or misanthropist is someone who holds such views or feelings. The word's origin is from the Greek words (misos, "hatred") and (anthrōpos, "man, human"). The condition is often confused with asociality.

Misanthropy has been ascribed to a number of writers of satire, such as William S. Gilbert ("I hate my fellow-man") and William Shakespeare (Timon of Athens). Jonathan Swift is widely believed to be misanthropic (see A Tale of a Tub and, most especially, Book IV of Gulliver's Travels).

Molière's play The Misanthrope is one of the more famous French plays on this topic. Less famous, but more contemporary is the 1970 play by Françoise Dorin, Un sale égoïste (A Filthy Egoist) which takes the point of view of the misanthrope and entices the viewer to understand his motives.

Fernando Pessoa's "factless autobiography" The Book of Disquiet has been described as misanthropic.

In Western philosophy, misanthropy has been connected to isolation from human society. In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates describes a misanthrope in relation to his fellow man: "Misanthropy develops when without art one puts complete trust in somebody thinking the man absolutely true and sound and reliable and then a little later discovers him to be bad and unreliable ... and when it happens to someone often ... he ends up ... hating everyone." Misanthropy, then, is presented as a potential result of thwarted expectations or even excessively naïve optimism, since Plato argues that "art" would have allowed the potential misanthrope to recognize that the majority of men are to be found in between good and evil.Aristotle follows a more ontological route: the misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a beast or a god, a view reflected in the Renaissance view of misanthropy as a "beast-like state".

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